The weekend and I get to wax poetic…or intellectual….or comedic…..or…well you get the idea….

I have written before just how important books are to me and that I have at least a 1000 books in my library and not one is a book of fiction.

My love of books came from my childhood…..I was brought in a home with a absent father and a mother that had to work to make ends meet….so I was given toys but mostly books that expanded my mind….this lead me to question so much…..and in later life thank my Mom for her insistence that I read and ask questions……

I read something that distressed me….that my books may be suffering from what is know as the literary “slow fire”……

Sometimes you need to be brutal, eschewing sentimentality as you cut off a spine or replace a book’s old, water-stained cover. At other times, gentle, delicate—especially with the books from Special Collections, those unique, fragile (and expensive) texts. And sometimes you find books with yellowed, stiff pages. The old dog-eared folds break off in triangles, flutter to the floor. These books can’t be helped by simple repairs—they’re acidified, dying, and the opposite of unique. In fact, they’re examples of a large-scale catastrophe that’s been quietly building in libraries for decades.

It’s called a “slow fire,” this continuous acidification and subsequent embrittlement of paper that was created with the seeds of its own ruin in its very fibers. In a 1987 documentary on the subject, the deputy Librarian of Congress William Welsh takes an embrittled, acid-burned book and begins tearing pages out by the handful, crumbling them into shards with an ease reminiscent of stepping on a dried-up insect carcass.

The Little-Known ‘Slow Fire’ That’s Destroying All Our Books

I believe the slogan…”Reading Is Essential”……

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”